


Freedom Wings

by Evangeline_Pearl



Series: Chains of Freedom [1]
Category: Skip Beat!
Genre: Abusive Parents, Acting, Angst, F/M, Implied Sexual Content, Neglectful Parents, Past Rape/Non-con Elements, Sexual Tension, Sharing a Bed, Step-Sibling Incest, Step-Siblings in Love, Step-siblings, Tattoos
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-14
Updated: 2017-08-14
Packaged: 2018-12-14 22:01:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con, Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,123
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11792349
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Evangeline_Pearl/pseuds/Evangeline_Pearl
Summary: Two very broken families, two shattered children. When the world and their parents failed them, they found solace in each other only to be ripped horrifically apart. Finding each other again is but a fragment of a dream reflected in their waking nightmare. Freedom is but a sad, tired dream, but sometimes. . . sometimes all one needs is the power of choice, a pair of wings, and a love that can withstand anything—even when it shouldn't have to.





	Freedom Wings

**Author's Note:**

> This is only an expose on this verse. It will most likely expand, and things might get a little tricky as other characters get involved. Writing style will not be the same throughout.
> 
> Enjoy the ride!

Her name is originally Watanabe Setsuka.

She's the result of a drunken weekend and the cause of a shotgun wedding. She has her half-American mother's baby blues and her silvery blond hair. She gets the shape of her nose and her uncanny brilliance from her father. She's a beautiful baby, and three months into her life, her pictures make her an instant internet success. Soon, she is engaged in infant modeling and broadcast in various baby commercials. She even stars as a toddler for a new drama series.

The fairytale never really began, but it finally ends when she turns three. Her beautiful, beautiful mother is no longer the beauty she once could have become. Her hair falls thin and limp, her eyes dull and empty. She looks more and more gaunt with each day. The fits of anger and rage banishes the toddler child from her for months on end, and she finally runs five months after Setsuka's third birthday.

She never looks back at the child she left so cruelly behind.

Setsuka's heartbroken father begins to waste away. He skips his meals and calls in sick to work. All he ever does is sit on the couch and watch reruns of their family home videos, fingers grazing the screen on her mother's cheeks. He misses her more every day, and soon he has no job to call in to, and only liquor fills the cupboards.

He makes her stand on their circular coffee table like a doll or statue. Sometimes he decks her out in her mother's clothes that are far too big for her, and sometimes he doesn't let her dress at all. She cannot leave the room without him dogging her heels those days, his eyes fixed on her hair like he might catch her mother if he follows close enough.

Soon enough, he touches himself while he stairs, and his eyes cloud over even more each day. He always tells her to smile, and he always finds relief in the tears tracking down her smiling face.

He is still her father, and he still smiles gently at her. He still pats her head fondly on the good days, and he still kisses her cheek before bed. He is still her father, even if his dark eyes are twisted, his hands sticky, and his lips linger longer than she likes.

Ir is her fourth birthday that things come to a head. He sits, staring like he always seemed to be, and life fills him with new purpose. That day, he pulled his zipper free and set to work with a fervor she could not remember seeing in him before. And when he's nearly done, he pulls a gun from behind one of the couch pillows. Just when she is so terrified her legs give out on her, he puts a bullet between his own eyes, and his semen lands on her face for the first and final time.

Two days later, nothing has changed. The police walk in to the sight of a man gone insane on love and his petrified daughter.

All because her mother could not find it in herself to cope.

* * *

 

He is born Cain Griffin to a small-town, country-hick, lonely bar hostess that fell in love with a frivolous man. He wooed her and left her without once looking back. He never saw the sad smile on her thin face or the hand on her stomach.

She wants the best for her little boy, but she cannot keep up with the work at the bar when she has a colicky five month old at home. When she's fired, the high school dropout has little other options. She tries her hardest, but there is little she could do. Eventually, she can only settle for trying to keep her work away from home.

But the pay sucks, and there is nowhere near enough motels in the world to keep her reputation from getting around. So she tucks her handsome little four year old into bed, kisses him goodnight, and tells him not to open the door no matter what he hears. She only wishes their ratty apartment walls were sound proof, and he already knows something is wrong when she locks the door on her way out.

Two months of moans, pants, grunts, and the occasional scream of agony, and his morbid curiosity wins out. He sits at the keyhole and watches his mother's body thrash. Night after night, it is all the same, her continuously violated by men nearly twice her size on a red-soaked mattress.

After that, he goes silent. He cannot bear to use the voice he got from her, not after hearing  _that_. Outside, he watches the stress and her lifestyle slowly eat away at his mother's body. Her couch comes in winter and grows worse over time. Soon, her bed is empty every night no matter what she wears when she leaves and her sheets are stained red for an entirely different reason.

She writes a letter on his sixth birthday and has him take it out to the mailbox. Before he even shuts the tiny box tight, he knows. The letter is still there when she draws her final breath hours later. It is still there when social services comes to take him away.

All because his father was too weak to face his fears and love the only woman that could ever love all his faults.

* * *

 

The two meet in a lonely, little room in a small orphanage. One look at each other, and they  _know_. He knows she's an angel that lost her smile, and she can see the devil brewing in his eyes.

And in the deep, dark, lonely nights, they speak to each other in soft whispers, curled around each other under tattered blankets. She tells him of the look in her father's eyes. The words fall in rapid sobs, of the way he reached for her but never did touch her, how she scavenged for food in emptying cabinets until nothing at all was left. Of the way she cried herself to sleep in their bathtub every night after he had drunk himself into a stupor.

He holds her tight and tells her of the screams and the pain and the blood and the sickness. He tells her of the fear that someone would open that door someday and find him there. Of the feral rage he sometimes feels coiling tight in his chest. Of the anger at his weak, weak mother, but also the haunting terror that he may someday become the beast that turned her into that.

All too soon, they are inseparable.

They slept together, they bathed together, they ate together. She would not touch a morsel that did not come from his hands, and he refused to sleep without her in his arms.

They saw fear in each other's eyes, and knew they were each other's salvation.

 

But she is six and he is eight when a man and woman appear in the doorway, separately, with mirroring expressions of anguish in their eyes. Setsuka is ripped away from him screaming by a woman with long hair and the same beautiful eyes. He is dragged the other way by a man he has never met but recognizes the jaw and dark hair he sees in his own reflection.

They stare at each other over lonely, shuddering shoulders as they draw farther apart, and know this is not the end. It is a promise of love for each other, a vow of hatred for these parents that tore them apart, and a swear to one day find each other again.

She goes home to a suburban house with a fake, fake liveliness to it, and far too much sparkles to be real. There, she is pushed and prodded into learning her mother's ways and exceeding the woman's warped expectations. Her room is filled with frills and dolls in pink and purple. And she hates. She hates the glossy shine of the overhead lights. She hates the soft comforter on her cushy bed. She misses the dark room she used to sleep in, wrapped on their hard cot in Cain's arms.

He goes home to a mansion he has only seen the likes of in newspapers and fairytales. There, he is forced to learn all the mannerisms of "bred" society and the sort of hatred only politics and pompous fools could foster. And he hates. Hates the way people look at him, like he's a demon for being born out of wedlock. Hates the way they talk about his mother like she were nothing more than a rabid dog that needed to be put down. He wants nothing more than to have his little angel back, sitting at his side, reading books to him in her questioning, confused voice. 

And their hatred stews in the dark and lonely days of solitude. She cannot eat, and he cannot sleep.

 

* * *

She is graduating elementary and he middle school when they come home to their parents' weird, weird smiles. It is that night that they see each other for the first time in nearly five years, and it is to be told they were going to become siblings.

It is both a blessing and a curse. Wonderful bliss because  _finally_ they are together again, two broken halves that fall right into each other's cracks to soothe all the jagged edges the world has left on them. But also a wounded anguish because their parents do not  _understand_.

They do not know why their kids are so attached, whey cannot even breathe when they are apart. Neither child speaks a word of their secret, secret world of two.

He gets shipped off to military camp, and she to an all girl's academy, in hopes of ironing out their idiosyncrasies.

Six months latter sees him sent back for beating two superiors to a pulp. She follows soon after by expulsion for cutting off three girls' hair and having them streak naked through the courtyard.

Their parents will never know that he beat them because they were forcing  _girls_ younger than his sister into hideous sexual acts. They do not know that she punished her classmates for  _raping_ a ten year old from their neighboring all boy's school.

She looks to him, and he looks back at her, and they know no one will ever understand. They have a bond unlike any other. He picks up cigarettes with a vengeance, and she gets piercings. He stares at the way her eyes shine with every new addition, and her eyes are hooked on the cigarette settled on his lip.

He drops out his junior year and gets his GED. He gets caught up with the wrong crowd out of spite for his father, and constantly uses the man's money to bail him out. Two years later, she gets her own GED instead of completing high school, wanting to stay forever at his side.

They get matching tattoos on her fifteenth birthday, a pair of wings split between the two of them.

* * *

 

Soon though, punks try to get fresh with Cain's little sister and they find out just what kind of demon he really is. He's young, but big, bigger than most people. And they learn  _real_ fast not the mess with the younger Heel. She learns to fight in heels and he doesn't let up until he feels firsthand what it's like to get a stiletto to the gut.

He still has a scar. She kisses it every night.

He's big, he chain smokes, and he is all sorts of terrifying. But he's a beacon for attention and beautiful. He gets yanked off the street for a sudden photoshoot. It is only the shining glimmer in her eyes that prevents them from getting a shiv to the gut, but he likes the digits on the paycheck he receives.

Worlds cross the distance between their eyes, and she makes a plan. He takes on modeling, then soon after acting as a horror specialist.

Because he has to take care of her, and he hates relying on his father's filthy money.

Not even two days after his third job, his father cuts them off. Supposedly, it's to make them squirm, to make them come home. They hear through the grapevine that her mother is pregnant, but neither of them wants anything to do with it.

So he takes the next job out of town, then the next, then the next, and finally one out of the country. They end up in Japan, and it's still the best thing they have ever done.

The wings on their shoulders finally stop burning, they can stop hiding.


End file.
